Dr. Joycelyn Elders was born to sharecroppers, and rose through the ranks to become Surgeon General of The United States. She had a proven track record of reducing both teen pregnancies and STD transmission rates. However, she was forced to resign because of how she did it; through education.
Sex Education Won't Kill You, Ignorance Will.
The other day I was recommended a video on YouTube. The video featured a man shouting about how there was another man on YouTube showing his anus to the world. I said, “that’s unbelievable,” and decided to check it out because if I was a cat, curiosity would have gotten me years ago.
The man in question was Kevin Leonardo, and he most definitely did show his entire ass. But I was perfectly fine with it. See, Kevin’s channel is basically a sex education channel aimed directly at gay men and the more, in depth, videos can’t be watched without confirming your age beforehand. I watched a few videos and only one contained nudity.
Kevin isn’t the only YouTuber covering sex education. Breasts, vaginas, penises, anuses, live births, STDS and so on, YouTube has no shortage of sex education, that features full nudity, and that’s a good thing. Sexual education is not pornography.
Ever since New Jersey became the first state to make sex education required in 1980, people have been trying to put a stop to it. This whole thing with Kevin Leonardo’s YouTube channel made me think of Joycelyn Elders and how people cost her a job, harassed her and attempted to make her a pariah, because she taught sex education.
Dr. Elders was born in Arkansas, her parents were sharecroppers, and she was the oldest of eight children. They were not wealthy. She worked hard, got a bachelor’s in biology. For a while, she worked as a nurse at Veteran’s Administration, a hospital in Milwaukee. In 1960, she decided to enlist in the army. There she trained as a physical therapist, rose through the ranks to become 2nd lieutenant. After 3 years she left and earned her doctorate at the University of Arkansas Medical School. Soon after in 1967 she earned a masters in biochemistry.
As a doctor, Elders was an endocrinologist who specialized in teenage girls and young women. There’s a laundry list of complications with a regular pregnancy, but diabetes increases all of those risk and adds more. This is what Elders chose to focus her career on. She once stated:
“If you’re poor and ignorant with a child, you’re a slave. Meaning that you’re never going to get out of it. These women are in bondage to a kind of slavery that the 13th amendment just didn’t anticipate.”
To battle teen and young adult pregnancies, puts emphasis on sex education for her patients. That includes the radical thought of masturbation as an alternative to unprotected sex. Out of approximately 260 of her patients, only 1 got pregnant. In the words of Dr. Elders, “masturbation never got anyone pregnant.”
She’s good at her job, and in 1987 Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton hires her to be director of the Arkansas Department of Health. Once again, she’s good at what she does. She boasts a 24 percent increase in immunizations, expands HIV testing locations, an increase in breast cancer screenings, and of course, dropping the teen pregnancy and STD rates.
But The United States isn’t Arkansas.
When Bill Clinton becomes president he selects Dr. Elders in January of 1993 as his surgeon general. However, she isn’t confirmed until September of that year. People were attempting to pass laws stating the Surgeon General needed to be a doctor as if she wasn’t a doctor. They weren’t familiar with her resume and never decided to look at before acting out.
The one misstep she had in Arkansas was passing out condoms with a high failure rate. When they learned of the issues with these condoms, they stopped, disposed of them and switched to a different brand. She didn’t make a public announcement stating why the switch was made because she felt it would have caused the people to distrust her office at a time when they were doing meaningful work, and admittedly she said she didn’t know if that was the right call or not.
Despite endless questions about the condoms, she’s confirmed, and she gets to work; again, focused on sex education. When it comes to children is as simple as “good touch, bad touch,” but critics claimed she wanted to pass out condoms and birth control in grade schools.
In December of 1993 she proposed the legalization of drugs such as marijuana to not only limit addiction but lower the crime rate. It sounds absurd but countries like Portugal and The Netherlands have decriminalized drugs for personal use. They’ve seen a decrease in not just crime, but overall drug usage and HIV infection. It turns out when drug users aren’t forced to hide in the dark edges of society, it’s a lot safer to drugs. It also becomes a lot easier to treat people with addiction.
What was the response to her suggestion of legalizing Marijuana here? Her son Kevin was arrested for selling cocaine to an undercover police officer, several months prior. Nobody thought to charge him before that, nobody arrested him before that, it just came out of thin air. He was sentenced to 10 years but only served 4 months. To this day, Kevin claims he was set up to sell the cocaine by the undercover police officer. I don’t need to tell you that’s unheard of. Undercover police have tricked special needs children into selling drugs. They even got Tim Allen with the same strategy.
The war on drugs in America is barbaric, but we’re talking about Dr. Elders and sex education. In January of 1994 she says the first of two things that I completely agree with, but those are things that lead to her forced resignation. The first thing she said was, “we really need to get over this love affair with the fetus and start worrying about children.” Considering anti-abortion people fought another 28 years to overturn Roe vs Wade, it’s obvious that it didn’t go over well.
Later that year she’s speaking at a conference held by The United Nations to address the HIV/AIDs crisis. A reporter asked if she felt it was appropriate to promote masturbation with or without a partner as an alternative to other forms of sexual activity. Her response was:
“As per your specific question in regard to masturbation, I think that is something that is part of human sexuality and it’s a part of something that perhaps should be taught, but we’ve not even taught our children the very basics. And I feel that we have tried ignorance for a very long time, and it is time that we try education.”
Critics started yelling that she wanted to teach school aged children how to masturbate. I can tell you from experience, people figure it out on their own. Then they labeled her a bigot for pointing out that The Catholic Church is led by supposedly celibate men who therefore have no stake in abortion rights, yet they spend millions every year trying to stop abortions. While her forced resignation has been the most public, she’s not even the first Surgeon General to resign over sex education.
C Everett Koop was Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General. He’s a racist and a homophobe, but he’s also the only person in the Reagan administration who attempted to fight the HIV and AIDs crisis.
He might not like Black people, and he might not like gay people, but he likes Americans, and it was his job to make sure Americans were healthy. For the first 4 years he held the office he was not allowed to speak on HIV/AIDs. Ronald Reagan fired him because he decided he couldn’t stay silent any longer. He attempted to expand sex education across the country as a way to battle the crisis. This included materials on proper use of condoms and mailing pamphlets about HIV and AIDs to every single house in America.
I only mention Koop because he was part of a group of former Surgeon Generals who joined Elders to testify against needing parental permission to teach sex education. Elders, Koop, Antonia Novello, Paul Ehrlich Jr, Julius Richmond, and Jesse Steinfeld all stood on the same position about sex education and went before the senate together. It’s not about Republicans or Democrats, men or women, economic class and it’s not about race or sexual orientation. All of these very different doctors stood behind Elders and agreed sex education was an important key to dealing with teen pregnancy, and STDs.
Dr. Elders once stated she was against abstinence only teaching “because it is child abuse,” and she’s not lying. Refusing to teach sex education should be seen as a human rights violation.
I’m glad people like Joycelyn Elders exist and continue to push for sex education. That means I’m also glad people like Kevin Leonardo are teaching the dos and don’ts from their experiences and showing their ass holes on YouTube.